Balancing science and practice: A case of Agota Šidlauskaitė (Agatha Sidlauskas) and her Venta Preparatory School

Abstract

A certain split between science and the practice of psychology can be seen throughout its history. But what happens when a scientist becomes a practitioner, and she still seeks scientific background for her practice? I present such a case hereinafter. Agota Šidlauskaitė (later Agatha Sidlauskaite, Sidlauskas, 1914-2017) had an exceptional life and career in developmental psychology. She finished Master level studies at the Theology faculty of the Lithuanian (Vytautas Magnus) University in 1936, received a perfezionamento (PhD level) diploma at Milan in 1943 (Agostino Gemelli was one of her supervisors there), and left emigrated to Canada. Šidlauskaitė was long a professor at the University of Ottawa, the founder and a head of the Child Study Center there. In my paper, I will concentrate on Šidlauskaitė’s late professional activity. It started after her retirement from the University, in 1981, when she founded the Venta Preparatory School at Carp near Ottawa. Šidlauskaitė held the leading position at the school until 1993, and later worked as psychologist there for about two decades. At the school, individualized programmes of educating and socializing were created for each child, who often had learning difficulties or disabilities, on the basis of mandatory psychoeducational testing. The teaching methods applied were based on Šidlauskaitė’s “deep scientific insights” (Rimkutė, 2008), and they were validated in practice by the desirable results achieved. An original set of ideas from philosophy, psychology, pedagogy, psychopathology, neurology were employed during the interventions. However, besides her publications as a professor at Ottawa University, Šidlauskaitė left rather few academic papers related to her post-University practice. This seems quite strange for a person who has had a long academic career, and has had scientifically based original ideas successfully applied in real life, and thus inspires us to take a closer look. Šidlauskaitė’s cautious approach to academic explanations of her methods was partially overcome by her Lithuanian colleague, Eglė Rimkutė, who published what can be called a reconstruction of the theoretical background of the educational practice at Venta school (Rimkutė, 2008), and shared some observations during an interview (Almonaitienė, 2022). [...].